In 2001, Giovanna Covi published the text of Imoinda together with its translation into Italian, which she conducted with Chiara Pedrotti, as an Appendix to a volume on Caribbean women’s literature.
Joan Anim Addo’s choice to re-present Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko in the voice of the silenced wife of the royal, enslaved protagonist, had teased her interest since she first read the manuscript. Not only did this compel Covi to re-assess her appreciation of Aphra Behn; Anim-Addo’s choice to sing Behn’s novel in the form of a creolized Italian opera had interpellated her in ways she could not avoid. As an Italian scholar in Caribbean literature, in fact, she felt it was her responsibility to help disseminate a work by a Grenadian writer which invoked Italian culture in order to break the silence of slave women’s lived experiences.
Imoinda is clearly more than a feminine rewriting of the history of slavery; more compellingly, it redesigns the liberal ethical and political frame within which the history of slavery as well as the relationship between Europe and the Caribbean are commonly understood. Imoinda sings because her survival to the inhuman conditions of slavery is indeed a good reason to celebrate, and her singing reshapes a familiar music—by retrieving the lost voices of slavery in this way, Joan Anim Addo allows the articulation of a feminist perspective on issues of human rights, freedom, colonialism and postcoloniality as well as subjectivity that overcomes the modernist paradigm